Awesome!! They're so great; it's been such a joy to be welcomed into their project.
And totally — especially if there is indeed a larger library still waiting to be excavated. Who knows how many completely unique texts are waiting to be read, if we just have the right method to do so?!
This is a pretty intriguing contrarian view. I recall fielding many such inquiries during my Google days.
Of course, ideally every company (and organization) would offer fantastic customer service in every situation. In a world where that doesn't always happen, having an additional safety valve can be helpful for customers and companies alike.
If something is eye-catching enough that a newspaper would report on it, or it would get traction on HN or social media, that's worth the time to dig deeper and investigate what happened. Again, it's not the optimal way to triage issues, but it's better than ignoring outside feedback entirely.
If folks are looking for another Tracy Kidder book, I'd recommend _House_. It's the story of building one house in Massachusetts in 1985 or so. Kidder goes into the life of the buyers and the builders, and the result is surprisingly compelling.
I know what you're thinking: why not _A Truck Full of Money_, Kidder's book about Paul English, the founder of Kayak? It's a fine read, but I found _House_ to be more contemplative and open up wider vistas (for me, at least).
Kidder is a great writer. I think people might enjoy _House_.
Or better yet (than Truck), check out "Mountains Beyond Mountains", about Paul Farmer's quest to defeat infectious disease where it's needed most and available least around the world.
Yes, reading that book made hearing about Farmer's recent death hit hard. Hopefully the system of clinics he set up in Haiti and elsewhere will survive long term after his death.
I have to say, I read quite a bit of that but got bored with it. Not that it's not a great story about important work, but at some point I felt like I'd read all I needed to.
I still mull over his comment about the role of "architect":
> Between 1830 and the Civil War, architects published scores of pattern and style books. At one point or another, most of those volumes argue that an architect offers the client protection from the builder. The case is often founded on social class, the architect being the client's ally by virtue of education and breeding. The argument plays upon the suspiciousness of clients about builders, a wariness that seems to have been around for so long that it probably deserves to be called natural.
I can't help but apply that class interpretation to the roles of "architect" and "developer" in a software project.
I enjoyed House which I read at the time I had just bought an old farmhouse. He's a very good writer although I have to admit that some of the topics he's chosen for books don't really make me want to dive in.
I wrote the first version of SafeSearch, Google's family filter. That led to the insight that Google could be spammed. That led to fights with Google's founders--Sergey thought Google couldn't be spammed, for example.
Eventually the founders realized that Google could be spammed, so I helped build the team at Google that tries to keep Google's rankings from being manipulated.
I was also proud to serve in the U.S. Digital Service, which is the groups of geeks that rescued healthcare.gov. The U.S. Digital Service has done a ton of impactful things for Veterans, immigrants, students, small business owners, and many others.
Most recently, I served as an expert on spam and bots for Twitter in their lawsuit against Elon Musk.
The first article includes this snippet: "If there is reason for optimism, though, it lies with the medical background of Oshmyansky, the company’s co-founder and CEO, according to Gewanter.
'The radiologist Cuban is working with knows the business,' Gewanter said. 'Between the two of them, it is not difficult to imagine that they will figure out where the gaps are and how to exploit them. We can only hope that when they do, our patients will be the beneficiaries.' "
I think YC made a fantastic choice including Alex's company in YC, and it's been a pleasure seeing what Alex has done and is doing. I'll stop there for now.
For data science, we've seen things from looking at disability claims appeals of Veterans and how those are handled, to looking for anomalies and malicious attacks on login.gov, to looking at Medicare payments and how to improve that process.
The data that the government has is often smaller scale than industry, but it usually represents people who are genuinely in need of help.
If you wanted to try a short tour, now is a very good time; things are quite remote-friendly right now. Then when the COVID situation is better, you'd have better information about whether the DC trade-off is worthwhile.
The work we're doing helps everyone from Veterans to medical patients. Making government services responsive, accessible, and transparent is really important right now.
Please consider applying, or just ask here if you have any additional questions!
Is USDS recruiting focused solely on tech companies? I know some strong folks looking for work, but they're coming out of being digital people in DC nonprofit world, not working at tech startups.
